Introduction

Sue Suprianos Steppin Out of Babylon is a radio interview series covering a broad range of important issues in todays world: peace and war, human and civil rights, communication, the media, the environment, food security, racism, globalization, immigration and matters of the spirit. Over 250 shows are available at this site!

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Jennifer Washburn

University, INC.- The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education

Jennifer Washburn is a freelance journalist and a fellow at the New America Foundation. She writes for Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, The Nation and other national magazines. She speaks of how commercial forces have quietly transformed virtually every aspect of academic life during the past two decades and how universities are now acting more like for-profit patent factories while professors are behaving more like businessmen. Universities now often hold financial interest in the same companies that stand to profit from their professors' research. Washburn exposes how financial conflicts of interest in the academy can even endanger public health. One example she gives is that of academic professors who buried negative trial data and/or downplayed negative results of their research on the effects of Paxil and Zoloft on the behavior of children and teens. Washburn paints an alarming picture of how the academy-- the nation's last refuge for independent thought-- is being colonized by a market ideology that is fundamentally at odds with what have been thought to be the core values of the university.